Hello.
In our report, we presented a brief history of all the measures within the employee insurance system since 1940 that have discriminated against women, either directly or indirectly.
I will spare you the details, but we would like to focus on the last measure, namely, from the 1996 reform, a measure that determined eligibility for benefits based on the number of hours of work, rather than the number of weeks worked. In our view, this measure discriminates against women directly and represents a continuation of all the other measures that have discriminated against women, including the first, whereby, until 1957, in order to access benefits, married women had to prove they had a permanent attachment to the labour force. The new rule does exactly the same thing.
The 1957 reform established admissibility based on hours. I have put together some numbers to serve as examples, which you can look at later when you have a written document. The last example available in the document was from Montreal, where the employment rate was 7.5% in March 2007. To qualify, 630 hours of work are needed.
Let us compare a woman who works part time, 15 hours a week, and a man who works 40 hours a week. In order to qualify, the woman needs to have worked for 42 weeks; the man, 16 weeks. If they earn the same hourly wage, they will each be entitled to 17 weeks of wages. However, for the same number of work hours over a much longer period, which therefore means a greater effort and more consistent presence in the labour force, the woman will receive $124 in benefits while the man will receive $264. They accumulated the same number of hours to qualify, but the man's benefits are more than double what the woman receives. If we compare the benefits received during the 17 weeks, we see that the woman will have received $3.34 in benefits for each hour of contribution, while the man will have received $7.12.
No matter what example we look at, and no matter what region, people who work part time—and 68% of part-time workers are still women—will be eligible for benefits to a lesser degree than people who work long hours for a shorter period. For that reason, we recommend returning to an eligibility system based on the number of weeks.
When the government introduced that measure, it claimed it would be beneficial for people who work part time. The reality is quite the opposite. In fact, people who work less than 15 hours a week, and who were excluded under the old rule, may never qualify.
Another problem is how the average weekly earnings are calculated. The divisor system is used. The income earned in the last 26 weeks is divided by the number of weeks worked, or else a denominator is determined and that denominator is usually two weeks more than the number of weeks of 35 hours that must be worked. In our example, with an unemployment rate between 7% and 8%, 18 weeks would be the denominator. This particularly affects women who work in precarious jobs, especially in industries like food service, hospitality and retail, which are seasonal, but not necessarily in regions of seasonal employment, where the unemployment rate is generally high.
Women work a lot more in casual jobs. The 26 weeks that are taken into account could include many breaks, which could also lower the average weekly earnings.
The third aspect of the reform, which dates back to 1979 and also discriminates against women—and deliberately, from its inception—is the rule known as the NERE rule, concerning new entrants or re-entrants to the labour force. Let us suppose that in 2007, an individual worked less than 490 hours, but met the requirements in relation to the unemployment rate in her region in 2008, and she finds herself unemployed in 2009. If she has not accumulated 910 hours, she will still not be eligible.
That rule was introduced in 1979 specifically to prevent people who are entering the labour force from being eligible for employment insurance, specifically young people who are working their first job and older women who are returning to the labour force after raising their children. It was partially modified in 2001, for people who received maternity or parental benefits. However, this still affects women who have three children, for example, and whose absence is longer or who, upon the arrival of their second child, were not eligible for benefits.
We therefore recommend that the NERE rule be eliminated altogether. We also recommend that we return to a system based on the number of weeks worked, taking into account all weeks of seven hours or more.
We have other recommendations, but perhaps during the question and answer period we could—